Motivational Quotes

Life

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

- Kafka, Franz

Best Quotes about Life

Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

Whittier, John Greenleaf

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.

Angelou, Maya

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination

Isherwood, Christopher

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Camus, Albert

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Munger, Thornton T.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

John Lennon

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

10.

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Stoppard, Tom

11.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Pirandello, Luigi

12.

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

13.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

14.

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie, Dale

15.

It's not how long life is but the quality of our life that is important.

Dawson, Roger

16.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Hayakawa, S. I.

17.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

18.

Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.

Caddy, Eileen

19.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Camus, Albert

20.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

21.

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do -- it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

Lawrence, D. H.

22.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

23.

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

Ruskin, John

24.

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

Nee, Watchman

25.

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

Johnson, Samuel

26.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

27.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

28.

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour,we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

William Shakespeare

29.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

James, William

30.

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

31.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Kennedy, John F.

32.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Thornton Wilder

33.

The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.

Young, J. Z.

34.

Well, take your time and don't live too fast. Troubles will come and they will pass. Find a woman and you'll find love. Don't forget, son, there is someone up above.

Skynard, Lynard

35.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

Austen, Jane

36.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

37.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

38.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi

39.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

40.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

42.

Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining, physically exhausting, and short.

Newman, Peter C.

43.

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

Piatt, Don

44.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Gauguin, Paul

45.

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Percy, Walker

46.

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

47.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

48.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Pavese, Cesare

49.

Life is supposed to get tough.

Grammer, Kelsey

50.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Southey, Robert